In Tesco Everyday Value Beef Burgers, horse meat accounted for approximately 29 per cent of the meat. The supermarket announced last night that it was removing all fresh and frozen burgers from sale immediately regardless if they had been found to contain horse meat.

Tim Smith, the group technical director of Tesco, said: “The presence of illegal meat in our products is extremely serious. Our customers have the right to expect that food they buy is produced to the highest standards.”

An investigation was carried out by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. The Food Standards Agency, working with the Irish authorities, established that mainland Britain was part of the area affected.

More than a third (37 per cent) of the products tested in Ireland contained horse DNA, while the vast majority (85 per cent) also contained pig DNA.

The Times:

ABP Food Group, the processing company at the centre of the controversy, announced that it would introduce DNA analyses of its meat products as part of a new testing regimen. It said that it had never knowingly bought or supplied horsemeat and was at a loss to explain how it was found to make up 29 per cent of one type of beefburger sold in Tesco. Silvercrest Foods in the Irish Republic and Dalepak Hambleton in Yorkshire, both owned by ABP, were found to have supplied beefburger with traces of equine DNA to supermarkets in the tests carried out in Ireland. Some beefburgers were also found to contain traces of pig DNA. Liffey Meats, a third processing company, in Co Cavan, in the Irish Republic, was also found to have produced beefburgers containing horse. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland identified the contamination after using the equine DNA test for the first time.

Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City University, London, yells the Daily Telegraph:

“It could have been going on for years but we wouldn’t know about it because we have never conducted tests. For too long we have had light-touch regulation. The Food Standards Agency has to be institutionalised into taking a more critical approach. They have to work on the assumption that things could go wrong.”

Philip Clarke, Tesco’s chief executive, adds:

“If some of our customers are angry, so are we.”

The company that flogged you horse meat marked as beef is as angry as you are. Poor wee lambs (ie poor wee old goat).

The thing is that no-one has fallen ill from eating the horse. They might have enjoyed the taste, it being on a par with the usual processed beefburger (contents: cow arsehole, eyelids, testicle skin and lips). Take Old Mr Anorak’s advice, eat Pedigree Chum – Whiskas for the ladies.

Photo: A pair of Canadian soldiers, Dooley Smith, left, and Larry Toye, both of Englehart, North Ontario, serving with the Royal Canadian Tank Regiment, listen to the sales talk of the owner of a horse meat butcherÂs shop located in Soho, LondonÂs cosmopolitan foreign quarters on Oct. 21, 1941. The girl and shop are Belgian.